March 15, 1998

By JACQUELINE CAREY

THE DOWER HOUSE
By Annabel Davis-Goff.
274 pp. New York:
St. Martin's Press. $22.95.

young woman visiting an Anglo-Irish country house in the middle of this century comes to the breakfast table carrying her handbag. When the incident is described in Annabel Davis-Goff's fine new novel, ''The Dower House,'' the upper-class characters immediately recognize the gaffe; that it is a gaffe is never questioned, but its meaning is harder for them to determine. The guest with the pocketbook evidently has some money to put into it; the son of the family, Desmond Paget, has been courting her in London, and when she is politely dismissed, so is the possibility of a marriage that might put off the impending decay of the Pagets' dilapidated old house. This intersection of snobbery, need, coldness and inertia is worried over by Molly Hassard, the novel's heroine, who senses the flaws in Desmond but loves and admires him anyway.

Molly and her older cousin, Sophie, the two young ladies whose marital choices provide the plot for the book, live in a world of hunt balls and leaking ceilings. Molly grows up in the dower house of the title, a residence ordinarily reserved for the widow once an entailed estate has been passed on to the older son. The sardonic and languid Sophie grows up in the mansion of the estate itself. In other words, Molly is the poor relation. But all the Anglo-Irish are having trouble living up to the splendors of their past. Molly's generation is the first to be born in an Ireland not under English rule. The whole purpose of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy has disappeared.

Desmond explains it in terms of glassware: ''When I was a child there were 11 wine glasses left. There had originally been 24 of each kind. Now there are 7, and one has a chip in it. They set that glass in front of my mother because she doesn't drink. The glasses can't be replaced. They're original Waterford, not the stuff they make now and sell to Americans. We couldn't afford to replace them, anyway. Everything's like that -- we're living on leftovers, preserving and patching and making things last.''

Although the upper-class life being elegized here also encompasses an offhand knowledge of dogs, horses, poetry and guns, Davis-Goff lavishes most of her attention on this type of seedy elegance: the yellow-tinted looking glass unevenly darker in the corners where the oxidized silver paint has worn off, the heavy linen napkins frayed at the edges, the slightly discolored fruit knives. Molly and her father eat a nearly inedible meal of kidneys on toast beside ''a long Irish Chippendale sideboard with carved lion masks and hairy paw feet stretched almost the full length of the wall.'' The disparity is lovingly delineated; Davis-Goff can be wry, but she is never satirical.

The book is unabashedly old-fashioned. The language is unmetaphorical, unspare. Davis-Goff, a baronet's daughter born in Ireland, can go on with ease about a gooseberry fool, game left to hang so long it is nearly rotten, or a ''barmbrack,'' a Halloween cake in which is hidden, for predictive purposes, a wedding ring, a sixpenny piece and a splinter of wood. Because Molly is trained as a child to run one of these endangered old estates, housekeeping details pile up seamlessly; Davis-Goff luxuriates in them. The prose is so evocative that I blinked occasionally when I realized the page in front of me was white, and not the faded green of velvet curtains and overgrown gardens. The book feels like a Christmas dinner: rich, heavy, extravagant, lush -- and traditional in a way that no one would dream of objecting to.

Sophie chooses cash over class early in the novel. (Love figures in her decision not at all.) Soon after her debut she becomes engaged to a vacant young Englishman from a rich bourgeois family, despite her parents' disapproval. Once she's married, she makes her new in-laws pay dearly for her. She buys so much that she doesn't even bother to open the fancy shopping bags, and she mocks the idea that money could purchase anything of worth; castles or jewelry that you don't inherit don't count. It is a sympathetic, convincing portrait of a conflicted woman whose choice brings no one any real happiness.

Molly, who seems to be a stand-in for the author, is more conscious of her ambivalence. She suspects that a cash-poor society has made a virtue out of necessity. Everything, after all, was new once. But there is a point at which Davis-Goff tips her hand. Before Sophie's wedding, her prospective mother-in-law also disapproves of the match. Then, after a mere afternoon and evening at the Hassard estate in Ireland, she develops ''a sickening suspicion that she had pursued the wrong prizes, aspired to the wrong goals, and that it was apparent to the Hassards that everything about her was false, shiny and nouveau riche.''

An astonishing passage. It assumes that the relative worth of these two ways of life is so self-evident that even a person on the losing side is bound to see it. This seems unlikely; in my experience, the people to whom one feels clearly superior, for whatever reason, remain annoyingly ignorant of that fact. It is also, for Davis-Goff, an oddly unreflective internalization of the class system.

Because what distinguishes her from many class-conscious British novelists (and is there any other type?) is her anthropologist's eye. Davis-Goff, who now lives in New York, never concedes an ounce of her affection, but the very intensity of her gaze makes it clear that she knows how different and strange this lost world is. She refers to her own childhood habits as ''customs,'' and many of the pleasures of the novel are similar to those of a really good memoir or travel book. (Anglo-Irish women have real pearls, but their diamonds are usually paste. It is hard to tell what anyone thinks of a present because the thanking is done in the low-key manner in which all the ''not actually insane Anglo-Irish that Molly knew conducted their social life.'')

A standard -- and maddening -- scene in English popular fiction shows the cultivated status of the main character being validated by a member of the upper class, who is pleasantly surprised at his excellent taste in antiques, architecture or whatever. ''The Dower House'' has a couple of similar, apparently gratuitous, scenes in which the aristocratic Molly's cultivated status is validated by a different type of character, a prospective employer who just happens to be a novelist.

Jacqueline Carey is the author of ''The Other Family,'' a novel, and ''Wedding Pictures,'' a novella with illustrations by Kathy Osborn.